REAL FISCAL CONSERVATIVES:

Appropriate Appropriation? (John Godfrey, 6/27/07, Wall Street Journal: Washington Wire)

Vice President Dick Cheney has been largely dismissive of congressional Democrats for years, but this time they might just hit him where it counts: the $4.4 million he’s told Congress he wants to run his White House offices in 2008.

The threat comes in response to Cheney’s claim that he’s exempt from a presidential order requiring those in the executive branch to report on how they are handling state secrets. Cheney says he’s exempt because he’s also president of the U.S. Senate and therefore not really part of the executive branch.

Cheney’s penchant for secrecy has ruffled feathers in the past, but this time an effort to retaliate is gaining momentum. “I’m going to let the money follow his legal logic,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D., Ill.) said in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon. Emanuel hopes to strip funding for Cheney’s White House offices from the annual White House spending bill when it’s debated by the House this week.

“We have decided that if the vice president is no longer a member of the executive branch, we will no longer fund the executive branch of his office,” Emanuel said. That would leave Cheney with the $2.3 million set aside in another annual spending bill for the vice president’s operations in the Senate.

That's still too much.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2007 7:05 PM